Her friends were into high conceptualism, but Hesse’s own approach is more playful, bodily, and feminist.
Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1966 , enamel paint, string, papier-mâché, elastic cord (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] This sculpture’s not usually up, but it’s a great Hesse. It’s wonderfully awful.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:10] What do you mean by wonderfully awful?
Dr. Zucker: [0:12] Well, she’s so pushing boundaries in so many important ways. I think in order to really appreciate Hesse, it’s really important to understand what her friends, what the avant-garde was doing at this moment.
[0:21] She was hanging around with people like Ad Reinhardt, with a whole series of artists that were involved in a high conceptualism. There was an attempt to create a perfection in the physical world that represented a kind of ideal that was…
Dr. Harris: [0:36] A kind of purity.
Dr. Zucker: [0:36] A purity that was incredibly cerebral, was incredibly geometric. One has a sense when you look at that kind of work, that anything that anybody could make — that Ad Reinhardt could make, for instance — would be a platonic shadow of the truth that he was after.
Dr. Harris: [0:51] Leave it to a woman to bring us something down and dirty that…
Dr. Zucker: [0:54] I think she did that really consciously.
Dr. Harris: [0:56] I don’t doubt it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:57] She was a very conscious feminist in that sense. It’s early for that phase of feminism. She was very aware of the implications of her making something by hand that was based in this old secondary tradition of handicraft that women had been saddled with.
Dr. Harris: [1:14] She’s wrapped thin rope around this…
Dr. Zucker: [1:17] This arching…
Dr. Harris: [1:18] …semi-circular form that’s hung by…
Dr. Zucker: [1:23] Itself, really, right?
Dr. Harris: [1:24] …nails on the wall.
Dr. Zucker: [1:24] It’s actually a beautiful swooping line that’s created there. The first impression you have when you look at this, because it’s this dark brown and it’s got this waxy buildup, it’s just incredibly organic and incredibly handmade. It feels like it’s of the body.
Dr. Harris: [1:41] It feels very bodily.
Dr. Zucker: [1:42] It’s…I mean, think about the connotations here, what does it remind…
Dr. Harris: [1:46] Pooped it out or…
Dr. Zucker: [1:47] It’s scatological. It’s intestines. It’s…
Dr. Harris: [1:51] Menstrual even.
Dr. Zucker: [1:52] It’s menstrual, or it could even be phallic.
Dr. Harris: [1:55] Phallic or breasts even hanging down.
Dr. Zucker: [1:57] Or it could be food. It could be sausage. You’ve got this really uncomfortable interaction between bodily functions that we don’t like to have mesh.
[2:06] We don’t like to see these things together. There’s a kind of incredible ambiguity.
[2:10] If you just think about [how] the human body has been represented historically, this is a pretty radical way of dealing with the human body and the way in which we think about ourselves.
[2:19] If this is food, if it’s excrement, if it’s our own bodies represented altogether somehow, that’s a pretty intense series of associations.
Dr. Harris: [2:27] That’s true. It’s something that I feel like feminism is going to take up and really run with.
Dr. Zucker: [2:32] They will. Hesse is rightfully seen as one of the most important artists that so many people then later respond to. I can’t imagine Kiki Smith’s work, for instance, without Eva Hesse.
Dr. Harris: [2:43] There’s also a primitivism here, it looks like.
Dr. Zucker: [2:46] Because it’s handmade?
Dr. Harris: [2:46] It just looks like a fetish object in an African culture.
Dr. Zucker: [2:50] Yes. It really does.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] …kind of weapon or something like that, too.
Dr. Zucker: [2:54] This seems, because of its materiality, because of its oldness and its handmade-ness, it feels like it could be in an ethnographic museum.
[3:01] That actually plays directly into what we were talking about a moment ago. In terms of its self-conscious secondariness which is embedded in this. We always think of that as not fine art.
Dr. Harris: [3:10] Right.
Dr. Zucker: [3:11] Is she self-consciously putting herself forward, not as an artist in the highest order? It’s really in opposition to what her friends were doing. What was happening in the art world. She’s great.
Dr. Harris: [3:22] She’s cool.
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